Rated People

Rated People is UK’s leading online marketplace matching homeowners with trusted tradespeople. The rapid, iterative insights I produced drove strategic product decisions forward and led to omni-channel UX improvement.

I evaluated/benchmarked existing product for performance and usability issues. I conducted prototype testing to uncover first impressions, blockers and issues that could be fixed. Examples of such projects looked at the following areas of the website and app:

Homepage/job form – multiple iterations

Lead tracker – in prototype and beta stages

User feedback from testing key job posting journeys on existing app

Comparing the ease of use of two different prototypes with the SEQ (single ease question)

Building a user research library MVP for future teams

To manage the rapidly growing archive of research I was creating, I needed to find a way to support sharing and collaboration of insights across multiple projects – and not just share these with the product team, but with anyone in the company who was interested (e.g. marketing and sales).

After researching solutions in the market, I introduced knowledge management MVP in the form of Aurelius Labs, a simple tool that allows you to upload, tag and group insight collections together.

Other problems I built business cases to hire tools to solve

how might we access non-customers for research?

how might we find ways to analyse customer product feedback from various sources in one place (e.g. appstore, email, calls, social media) more easily?

how might we reduce the amount of app inboxes and unstructured data we get from them?

Comparing and reviewing various UX tool and recruitment services/products based on our specific requirements

Governance and frameworks

I co-created brief templates for new research requests. The creates a shared, clear understanding of what we’re trying to achieve, what the success criteria are and avoids scope creep.

UX research process framework

I documented the full research cycle in terms of stages, outputs and wrote how-to guides on the common practices we used. This means future researchers have a framework to refer to and adjust. This also helps educate stakeholders, managing expectations on turnaround times, limitations and ask for a dedicated research budget

Advocating research as a company sport

Design thinking workshop with customer service agents

My proudest achievement is making research known as an activity anyone in the company can take up and use to ask/find answers to questions about users.

Making allies with the customer service team (Swindon call centre), I was the first to conduct several customer journey mapping and design thinking workshops. The insights were used to inform major strategic proposition developments of the marketplace

I created a research rota with regular callouts — for staff to participate in research as observers, note takers, guerrilla testers and help with recruitment